Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Video / Art / Ithaca

By Wylie Schwartz & Claudia Pederson

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Sfumato owner and curator John Criscitello (Criscitello’s portrait by Rachel Philipson).

On Friday, May 1, local artist John Criscitello will once again transform his private art studio, located in the old Calendar Clock Factory on Dey Street, into a public space for viewing art, with an evening of video art screenings (8pm to midnight) featuring over 23 works by a diverse grouping of local, national and international artists. Titled Video/Art/Ithaca, the event is the second in a series representing a collaborative effort between 6 local artists, art critics and art historians residing in or passing through Ithaca, including John Criscitello, Lindsey Glover, Claudia Pederson, Wylie Schwartz, Karen M. Brummund, and Nicholas A. Knouf, who were each asked to submit 10 minutes worth of work by the artists of their choice.

Co-curator Claudia Pederson, a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at Cornell University offers insight into the project's overall mission:

Contemporary video art is not often shown within Ithaca. This might be due to the dearth of venues in Ithaca for artists to show this kind of work, which requires a different type of space and ambience than traditional galleries. The upcoming screening night offers a focused chance to experience a wide variety of techniques and themes that are common to contemporary video art. Even so, the goal is not to show the most "experimental" or "innovative" work; rather, the project is foremost about the creation of new environments that foster autonomous gatherings, encounters, and exchanges. Images on the wall in a darkened studio space form another type of commons that shadow the main thread of the show.

The curatorial process of the second edition of the Ithaca video night shows maintains the original concept based on selections of each of the participating curators. The only requirement is that each curator limits her contribution to 10 minutes of digital video by invited artists of their choice. The final assemblage of selected projects is the responsibility of two of the members volunteering to take on the brunt of collating the works contributed and shown at a particular exhibit.

The show consists of works donated by 23 artists residing in and outside of the United States. The selected works date from within the last nine years. Considered in conjunction they present a limited scope of contemporary video practice situated mostly within the East Coast of the U.S. and Northern Europe.

It seems as though these works are best approached as artistic attempts at conveying that which is outside of logic and rationality. How does one represent longing, impressions, memories, a mood, love, affection, flirtation, sexual tension, trauma, war experiences, desire, ambivalence, absence, mourning, detachment, foreignness, displacement and humor? And how does one represent complexity and ambiguity?

These works explore modes of representation that stand in sharp contrast with mainstream film and video in which the complexity of human emotions is distilled and replaced by conventions. Think of the usual development of the story as a beginning, middle, and an end; the music interlude that signals danger, romantic involvement, betrayal, and so forth. The videos in the show do not seek to solicit the viewer's identification with the narrative and the characters, but to draw the attention to how images and sounds influence perception. The artists do this by constructing images and sounds with the aim to surprise, uplift, sadden and disorient. And in broad terms, they trigger emotional experiences that are in the most successful instances of works, themselves the subject of the project.

The themes of the present show emerged out of the selections of the six present curators. Eight themes are discernible among the selected contributions.

Self-referentiality as a model to approach the medium of digital video is notable in the works of artists that integrate feedback loops, appropriate existing video footage, and manipulate the camera to suggest absence in relation to an invisible male gaze. The conflation of the digital medium at hand with the subject matter of the work is marked in videos that evoke familiar futuristic tropes such as surveillance and the reduction of complex life processes to data.

In contrast, retro simulations of the cinematic medium are explored in abstract compositions that simulate hand painted and processed super 8 film. These works foreground a strand of video art that deals with the exploration of the relationship between the image and the soundscore.

The camera as a medium of self-reflective expression characterizes some of the works that register an interest in corporality. The artists' relationship with her body and other bodies is salient in works that reference corporality as a site of longing and intimacy, a medium of poetic invocations, as well as a subject of homoerotic desire implicit in tropes of masculinity. Some of these works are the more compelling for attempting to compose brief and frank simulations that address the complexities of negotiating human relationships within pre-existing social boundaries.

A sense of fleeting temporalities is conveyed by works in the show that function as impressions of travel experiences. These range from allusions to intimate moments glimpsed in bus trips to cartographies constructed in response to alienating signs, sounds and places or as attempts at imparting traces of native landscapes punctuated by evocations of trauma and conflict.

Some of the videos by artists whose work is informed by reflections and involvement with the politics of urban gentrification appropriate the iconicity of the image in order to formulate humorous commentaries about the links between monumentality and power. The spectacle of eighties americana, its marked obsession with the manipulation of the body, the latent repressed sexuality, and in general the excess associated with the era of hairspray and Reaganite politics is the subject of a few of the works shown, best perceived as outright parodies of rampant consumerism.

The theme of automation is related in few of the works that repurpose fragments of American TV broadcasts from the cold war period to evoke nightmarish Bauhaus experiments in efficiency and control startlingly encased in a cartoonish style.

Lastly, video documentation of artistic experiments in technology add a poetic note to alienating considerations of the machine as machines in turn singularly require accents, non-speech human interactions, and sonic scapes, to function effectively.

Works have been contributed by John Criscitello Ithaca/NY, Tara Cooper/ Toronto ON, Theodore Battaglia / Rochester NY, Andrea Minicozzi / Ithaca NY, Lindsey Glover / Ithaca NY, Joshua and Zachary Sandler/Brooklyn NY, Michael Greathouse/Brooklyn NY, Greg Lock/ Purchase, NY, Jax Deluca/ Buffalo, NY, Laura Brothers/Dryden NY, Claudia Pederson Ithaca/NY, Peggy Syllop and Giovanni Longo Berlin/Germany, Kelly Dobson, Boston/MA, Orkan Telhan, Boston/ MA, Anthony Graves, Ithaca/Brooklyn, U.S, Zohar Kfir/Montreal QC, Cathy Crane/Ithaca NY, Mike Baranczak and Kurt Piller /Ithaca NY, Christopher Cowan /Trumansburg NY, Nick Knouf Ithaca/NY, Ayah Bdeir Lebanon and NYC.

Special thanks all the artists that contributed to the show. We appreciate your generosity and collaboration.

Video/Art/Ithaca will take place Friday, May 1 from 8pm-12am at the SFUMATO studio, 201 Dey St. Loft 202. Admission is free, but donations are welcome.